Gparted errors and problems

[penguin2]

I have run into a Gparted problem that I am not familiar with. I've never seen it before.

I cannot create logical partitions without errors or not at all. I have two choices:

1) not checking 'round to cylinders' - I will get an error* and it will not partition

2) check 'round to cylinders' - it will partition but I will also obtain 4MB of unallocated space (each time)

This applies to Primary partitions, too, I think. At least, #2 will happen.

Imho, this is ridiculous. Why would I retain 4MB of unallocated space? In other words, the two choices above are not choices.

The error message doesn't explain much if anything either.
*"Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition"

Huh?

[devils casper]

Post the output of fdisk -l command here.

[aetiv]

I recently had some problems creating a partition on a USB with gparted. Turns out, the existing partitions were screwed up and causing all the havoc. To fix the situtation I used fdisk and deleted each partiton one by one and writing to the USB in between each session of deletion. I was able to use gparted without an issue after everything was off of the USB device .

[penguin2]

Oh, sorry but I tried something before I read your reply. Do you still want my output?

What I did was create all the primary partitions I could so 2nd primary is NTFS, 3rd primary is NTFS and the 4th (last) primary partition is an extended partition. Of course, the 1st one is NTFS and XP is installed there.

So, 1st - primary - NTFS - 15GB - XP
2nd - primary - NTFS - 15GB - ?
3rd - primary - NTFS - 15GB - ? (> - means nothing there yet)
4th - extended
logical partitions
linux swap - 2GB
ext3 - 50GB
ext3 - 50GB (approx.)

that's the disk - 160GB IDE/ATA

I'll post the output of that command soon. I booted up XP and I don't have a Linux OS installed yet. I can use a LiveCD to get that output, though.

NOTE: in 'applying operations 'to logical partitions, I had to have 'round to cylinders' checked or I would get errors (same error mentioned in original post).

[penguin2]

I wanted to add.... if I want to boot Windows and at least two or three distros, how should I do it? What do you recommend? Do you recommend a different way than above?

What size of Linux partition is sufficient? I have a 160GB drive so is 20GB or 30GB too small?

[devils casper]

We need output of fdisk -l command to check if there is any Cylinders overlapping. Post its output here.

15GB is more than enough for any major distro and you can install as many Linux distros as you like. I have 5-6 Linux distros + Windows XP in my test machine.

[penguin2]

results of fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/hda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xfa6efa6e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 1913 15361888+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda2 1913 3825 15360000+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3 3825 5737 15360000+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4 5737 19457 110206431+ 5 Extended
/dev/hda5 5738 5992 2048287+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6 5993 12494 52227283+ 83 Linux
/dev/hda7 12495 19457 55930266 83 Linux

Does that mean something is wrong with my drive???

Partition 1 is the Windows XP install....

[penguin2]

Oh, I was reading about partitions not ending on cylinder boundary. Maybe not serious? I'm not totally sure yet but I was wondering if I should 'fix' it.

No other way but to reinstall Windows?

I suppose Windows installer created this problem? I installed Windows first and the Windows installer created the NTFS partition but would it matter if I set up the partitions beforehand with GParted?

I would be able to 'tell Windows' to just install in the NTFS partition GParted can create. Would that avoid the issue? But, when I installed previously, I selected the Windows XP option to format the partition and then create the NTFS partition.

Please recommend a course of action here and if possible, explain what is going on now?

[yancek]

Should not be a problem, brief explanation at the link below:

Why “partition X does now end on cylinder boundary” warnings don’t matter

[penguin2]

Can I put much stock into that page? The author has a spelling mistake and the command sfdisk needs root privileges.

Anyway, my output is not as clean as the author's so I am still concerned:

# sfdisk -uS -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 19457 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.
Units = sectors of 512 bytes, counting from 0

  Device Boot    Start       End   #sectors  Id  System
/dev/hda1   *        63  30723839   30723777   7  HPFS/NTFS
               end: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,239,63)
/dev/hda2      30723840  61443840   30720001   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda3      61443841  92163841   30720001   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda4      92163842 312576704  220412863   5  Extended
/dev/hda5      92164905  96261479    4096575  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda6      96261543 200716109  104454567  83  Linux
/dev/hda7     200716173 312576704  111860532  83  Linux